Letters from the Readers: Unsavory folks make festival hardly worth it

Ken Garcia must sit in the press section at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, the annual free festival he praised Sept. 15. For most others, the experience is of arriving early, getting a good spot, waiting all day for Doc Watson, Emmylou Harris and Gillian Welch to perform, and then having the day ruined yet again by obnoxious yuppie drunks pushing in next to you, stomping all over your blanket and talking loudly through the performances.

Two-thirds of the crowd is there to hear the music and has learned how to act in public. The other one-third makes this free festival not worth going to.

Jeff Zorn

San Francisco

Wake up to pothole reality

Your Sept. 14 story “Road-related suits put city in hole” again shows the misguided priorities of our current Board of Supervisors. San Francisco has a budget of $6.5 billion dollars — bigger than that of 20 states — but still cannot fix potholes costing The City big money from lawsuits.

Until the voters of San Francisco regain their sanity and start electing supervisors who establish common-sense priorities, this kind of absurdity will continue.

E.F. Sullivan

San Francisco

Solution to health debate

I have found the solution to the inflated cost of health care. It is to appoint former bank executives to run health care companies. They have a proven track record of bringing down costs. Just look at property values. For more proof, ask their bankrupted shareholders how quickly these executives reduced asset valuations.

Paul Page

San Francisco

Ploys of the military

Military recruiters have ramped up their efforts to target our young, vulnerable teens. A staggering 34 million names of 16- to 25-year-olds is surreptitiously captured in the Pentagon’s Joint Advertising Market Research Studies database. It purchases students’ personal information from corporations such as Student Marketing Group and American Student List.

The military sets up sophisticated Web sites and video games to get our teens addicted to war games.

Jagjit Singh

Los Altos

Obama gets called out

President Barack Obama said in his speech to Congress that if people questioned his health proposals he would “call them out.” And then Rep. Joe Wilson shouted out “lie” when Obama said no illegal immigrants would receive health care. It seems to me that Wilson “called out” Obama. But the real problem was not the right or wrong of that comment, since we know that people will not stand for watching the illegals drop dead in the streets.

The problem was that the president was called out in the legislative chamber. Our lawmakers must demand respect and honor — especially so they can lie convincingly.